1632–1704. Locke, Wks. A dictionary containing a natural history requires too many hands, as well as too much time.
1711. Spectator, No. 232. The reduction of the prices of our manufactures by the addition of so many new hands, would be no inconvenience to any man.
1754. Fielding, Jonathan Wild, i, 14. The mercantile part of the world, therefore, wisely use the term ‘employing hands,’ and esteem each other as they employ more or fewer.
1811. Lexicon Balatronicum, s.v. We lost a hand, we lost a sailor.
1871. Chambers’ Miscellany, No. 113, p. 3. He was admitted as a hand in an establishment already numbering three hundred active workers.
1892. Milliken, ’Arry Ballads, p. 70. The hands has all bloomin’ well struck.
1892. National Observer, 22 Oct., vol. viii., p. 571. The dispute in the South-East Lancashire cotton trade is like to result in the stoppage of fourteen or fifteen million spindles which will take employment from sixty thousand hands, a fifth of them women and children.
1893. Fortnightly Review, Jan., p. 62. The wages paid to the operatives in our woollen industry are, to a marked extent, lower than those received by the hands employed in our cotton mills.
2. (coachmen’s).—See quot.
1856. Whyte Melville, Kate Coventry, ch. xv. Lady Horsingham was tolerably courageous, but totally destitute of what is termed hand, a quality as necessary in driving as in riding, particularly with fractious or high-spirited horses.